There's been no shortage of discussion as to how Wisconsin should most wisely spend the federal stimulus money headed our way.
For example, the Milwaukee Public School district just wrapped up three meetings, asking for public input. Perhaps the biggest unanswered question is, how the federal money will trickle down to the local level and put people to work.
WUWM’s Susan Bence reports on how Milwaukee's poorest residents might fare as the first dollars are parceled out.
Lois Quinn does a lot of thinking about what the federal stimulus package might mean for Milwaukeeans who were struggling before the economy took a dive.
Quinn is a researcher with UWM’s Employment & Training Institute.
She expects the first wave of work to be funneled into road repair and construction jobs. Quinn says the problem, is that even when times are good, Milwaukee’s under- and chronically unemployed have trouble breaking into that line of work.
She says it’ll take special intervention to change the situation.
“I think it’s a two-pronged thing. One is breaking down the contracts and then making sure that a number of the contracts do get to minority owned businesses. And then secondly putting pressure on the big guys who should have been reaching out into the central city neighborhoods for a long time and haven’t been,” Quinn says.
“First off the unions are going to hire their people laid off first, they’re going to bring all them back and then people will get whatever’s left after that. “
Civic activist Tyrone Dumas says the last laid-off will likely be the first called back.
But even if there is work left over, Dumas worries some struggling Milwaukeeans might not be able to jump in and take those jobs. He says that's because in many cases they don't have reliable transportation. Some don't have a driver’s license or a vehicle, and public transit might not reach the job site.
“I’ve been writing and writing this. I started before the election because we recognized that you’ve got to try some different things, you’ve got to be innovative, you’ve got to look at this from a different perspective. If you don’t the same people who are at the lower bottom of the rung who’ve always complained, we can’t get access to jobs, will not get access to these jobs,” Dumas says.
Marc Levine agrees with Dumas and Quinn that it will be challenging to make sure the stimulus projects benefit the hardest hit in Milwaukee.
But the UWM history professor says we can’t expect the federal program to cure systemic problems. He says its goal is to get the country out of its current financial mess, not to solve structural problems.
“The long-term redevelopment on the labor market depends on a host of other initiatives: a long run. You know long run investments in alternative energy, green technologies, part of the long-term plan of the Obama administration to kind of remake the economy for the 21st century, can have some very important impacts in terms of changing the employment prospects for the long-term unemployed,” Levine says.
Levine says Milwaukee should also do some innovative planning, like designing a state-of-the-art transit system to transport the labor market wherever it needs to go.
He says if it does, Milwaukee will be in a position to address its chronic problem of joblessness as federal dollars come through the pipeline.
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